Questions & Answers

Answer:

Here’s my understanding of your situation:

You are creating landing pages that are targeted towards specific audiences. You then drive traffic to those pages to test conversion rate, in an attempt to find an optimal product-audience match.

In this case, You’re using what’s called SEM (Search Engine Marketing), as opposed to SEO, where you leverage Google Ads to gain quick visibility and traffic.

Answer:

The BERT algorithm (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is a major update to how Google is processing context and words.

BERT is a deep learning algorithm surrounding natural language processing.

Google’s idea here was to improve their recognition of CONTEXT, especially for complicated searches.

This is how Google put it:

“These improvements are oriented around improving language understanding, particularly for more natural language/conversational queries, as BERT is able to help Search better understand the nuance and context of words in Searches and better match those queries with helpful results.

Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in your query. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.”

Answer:

These “info boxes” below the main result of your competitor are called “Sitelinks”.

Sitelinks are beneficial to have in many ways, including a higher click-through-rate, easier navigation for visitors, taking up more search space, etc.

However, there is some important information for you to know about sitelinks.

When Do SiteLinks Show Up?:

Sitelinks only show when two criteria are present:

1. You are, or very close to, the #1 spot for the given search…

Sitelinks are almost always awarded to the #1 spot on Google, and it is automatically applied when Google sees it as beneficial to the searcher.

2. Google determines it is beneficial to the user.

Here’s what Google Has To Say:
“We only show Sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good Sitelinks, or we don’t think that the Sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.”

Answer

Sitemaps are a best practice when it comes to optimizing your site with Google.

You can create one by either using a sitemap generator or using a plugin.

My favorite plugin to use for this is the “Yoast” WordPress plugin.

Yoast is kept up to date with how Google wants sitemaps to be formatted and will create one for you automatically at “Yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml”

Once you have your sitemap URL, you simply need to add it to your Google Search Console, so that Google knows where your sitemap is, and can more easily navigate your website.

If you’re using WordPress, Yoast is a great plugin to automatically generate a sitemap.

1. Download the Yoast plugin.
2. Go to Yoast plugin>>general>>Features Tab>> Click on question mark on “XML sitemaps” >> Click “XML sitemap” link. [Copy this URL] Then proceed to step 2.
3. Submit your sitemap to Google. For more help refer to this tutorial: https://kb.yoast.com/kb/submit-sitemap-search-engines/

Question by Elena Markin

Answer

Great question, and this is something that is important to know if your business uses a lot of images as content.

First things first, you need to determine if your business can benefit from your images being displayed within the images section of Google.

Images can generate leads through Google, especially if your business is image-based. So if your website is about photography, you want people who are searching for images to come across your content.

Let me be clear though, it’s always a good idea to add alt-text to your website’s images, but the reality is, if you’re not an image-based company, it’s probably not worth your time.

But let’s just assume you ARE a company who can benefit from well-optimized images for Google, how do you optimize an image?

Answer

I’ll cover this question by providing you the tools that you can use to access your current situation when it comes to SEO, and overall web-page optimization.

This means we have to look at two things. One, how your website is doing in terms of “on-page” SEO, and Two, how your website is performing in general (Speed, server response time, etc.)

Both of these are important to Google for different reasons. Website speed and performance may seem strange, but Google highly values fast websites as they’ve found that people searching on Google will not wait more than 2 seconds for a page to load.

To increase the user-experience, Google has started to look closely at how fast your website is loading, and if you website is loading quickly on mobile as well.

So here are some ways you can check your score in these areas.

How To Check Your Website Performance

Website speed is an important factor in SEO ranking, so knowing how your website is performing and which areas need improvement is very useful.

Knowing how your website is performing isn’t enough though, you also need to put effort into solving the issues you find.

Here are my favorite tools to use when analyzing a website’s speed and performance metrics:

Tool #1: GT Metrix

GT Metrix allows you input your URL and have the crawling bots visit your website in real-time. It will gather important timings, metrics, and information about your website’s performance and give you it’s top recommendations for improvement.

Here’s a scan of my website:

As you can see, the scores on our site are almost 100%. This is because we used tools like this to reach the fastest site speed possible. By following the suggestions GTmetrix gives, you can also speed up your website to below 2 seconds.

We can see that this report is recommending:

Leverage browser caching
Image Scaling
And more…

Here’s an example of an unoptimized site’s performance scores:

To explain how to implement all of the changes that are recommended, it would require an article for each one. So, I suggest searching Google for how to remedy the issues. There is some great how-to’s that will guide you through the processes.

Test your website on GTmetrix here.

Tool #2: Dare Boost

Dare Boost provides a more advanced look into your website performance and will find even more areas that you can improve. This tool is more for the experienced web developer, and might be a little overwhelming for people just looking to do “the general stuff”.

Nevertheless, I think this is a great tool to gauge your current website performance.

Feel free to test your website versus your competitors to see where you stand.

Question by Elena Markin

Answer

I will cover my favorite ways to compile & view SEO analytics.

The easiest way to compile SEO analytics can be done by first Setting up your Google Search Console account.

Google Search Console is the King of search metrics, because it comes straight from Google.

No tool is going to be 100% accurate, but GCS will give you the most accurate data possible.

Setting Up Google Search Console

To setup your Google Search Console account and link it to your website to start collecting your search data, you’ll first need to visit the Google Search Console Page.

Next, you’ll want to click on the “Start now” button.

You’ll need to create a Google account, if you don’t already have one, and you’ll be directed to this page:

After you’ve gotten to your main overview GSC page, you’ll want to click on the top left drop-down menu.

It will open up a menu that shows all of your website properties that are connected to your Google Search Console.

Next, click on “Add Property”

After clicking, you’ll see a prompt to verify your domain:

You’ll want to enter your website’s domain name into the left “domain” section, without “https://”, “www.”, or the trailing “/”.

Click continue, and you should be given a verification TXT record to add to your DNS records.

The next step in verifying your domain can be a bit much for a non-web-developer, but it really is quite simple.

Step 1. Go to your Domain Name Servers Host (This will be Godaddy, domain.com, or whoever you purchased your domain with.) — {If you directed your domain to a hosting server like Hostinger, Siteground, etc. You’ll need to edit them there.)

Step 2. Open the “DNS Zone Editor“

Step 3. Add a new TXT record

• Host/Name: “www”, “@”, or “yourdomain.com.”.
• TTL:  3600
• Record: {your-google-search-verification-record}

Step 4. Return to Google Search Console and verify your domain.

You can also improve your analytics by connecting your Google Search Console with your Google Analytics account…

Tool #1: SemRush

SemRush is an SEO favorite. It gives you so many tools to analyze and tailor your SEO campaigns and analytics. However, you are limited to a certain amount of reports per day on your free account.

If you want a quick glimpse into your timeline, and latest keyword & traffic increases, then you can see all of these by searching your URL in the “domain overview” section.

But maybe you’re looking for something that can track everything to do with your site. In this case, you’ll want to use the next tool I’m going to recommend.

In Conclusion

If you’re looking to get all your analytics into one place, the king of all tools is Google Search Console.

If you want to take things to the next level, I would suggest connecting your GSC to your Google Analytics to compile your SEO clicks, and conversion analytics.

On the flip side, if you want to get historical trends, keywords, and overviews to gauge your performance over time, especially against your competitors, then I would suggest SemRush as an easy-to-use free tool that can give you just about everything you need.

Finally, if you’re looking for an SEO tracking tool that stays up to date, then Ahrefs is the tool I would recommend. I’ve used all of these tools throughout our projects, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses.

Thanks for the question!

Question by Monte Stewart

Answer

This is one of the most important questions you can ask about SEO, especially if you business relies on getting business through Google.

Here’s the Good News — With the right amount of effort, maintenance, and forethought, the chances of your site losing it’s first page ranking is close to 0.

But, at the end of the day, it heavily depends on how hard your competitors are fighting you for the first page.

For example, if you have 10 other car dealerships fighting tooth-and-nail for a spot on the first page, while you’re kicking your feet up. It’s not rocket science to know you could end up seeing your SERP rankings slowly but surely being overtaken by their websites.

So what’s the most important thing to do to keep your rankings in a good place?

Well, there’s an old proverb that goes:

“You’re either improving or getting worse, there is no staying the same.“

If there’s one thing to learn from that proverb, it’s that you’re always going up or down, especially on Google, and “staying the same” or “maintaining” is not possible. So focus on improving your rankings instead of maintaining them, that way the worst case scenario is that you stay the same.

Here are my top 3 recommendations on maintaining your rankings:

#2: On-Page Optimization

Even though link-building is the most effective ranking method there is, on-page optimization comes in 2nd as the most important thing to get right.

Make sure you run your web pages through a site auditor like Ubersuggest’s site audit.

Steadily make recommended improvements to your pages, and you can improve your chances of maintaining your rankings.

Answer

Great question! The difference in how Social media search engines operate as compared to Google’s is like night and day.

There’s Two types of Social Media SEO:

1) SEO to rank on the Social Platform
2) SEO to rank your social page on Google.

The way you optimize your page will determine whether you rank on Google or the Social Media Platform itself, so it’s important to know there’s a difference and what you’re after.

For the sake of this article, I’m only going to cover Social Platform SEO fundamentals, as it eventually leads to Google rankings when your account becomes larger and more correlated with your identity.

The first thing you need to consider when optimizing your Socials is how you find what you’re looking for on each social media platform.

Then, you can reverse-engineer how you should optimize your profile according to what tools they give you to work with. For example, instagram:

Facebook SEO

Every Social Media Platform is different, and each one deserves a dedicated article on it’s own, but here is some advice for one more popular Social Media platform.

Facebook is a great platform for you personal brand, and your business, so it’s important to know exactly how to show up for relevant searches. Especially if individuals will be searching for you on Google or Facebook, and are trying to find your social profiles.

So here’s the SEO fundamentals for your Facebook profile:

1) Choose the perfect Facebook Page Name

Probably the most important thing to get right, having the proper name that people will be searching for should be your first priority.

Your Page Name should be focused on User experience, memorability, recognizability, and if necessary, 1-2 keywords. (If your name is already taken)

For example, “John’s Bakery” is taken, so you’d add a couple of keywords: “John’s Bakery | Desserts & Baked Goods”.

2) Claim a Vanity URL

A vanity URL is the URL that users see when they navigate to your page. (“facebook.com/your.vanity.url.here”)

For example, ICBC’s facebook URL is “/theICBC/”:

Thus, the “vanity” literally means that it makes the URL look nicer, but this new URL can have important keywords and will help your profile show up in search results.

You can easily change your profile URL here.

3) Add Important Keywords to Your Profile

Here are the sections you should add keywords to:

1. About section
2. Description section
3. Headline
4. Photo captions
5. Notes
6. Updates

It’s advisable to use a keyword research tool such as SEMrush, or Ubersuggest, to list out the most important keywords to you or your business.

Once you’ve compiled most of the relevant words, you’ll want to place them, naturally, inside of all of your info sections.
This simple procedure will help your facebook profile rank, not only on Facebook, but on Google too.

Just make sure all of your information is up-to-date, and you stay reasonably active, and you will be rocking & rolling in no time.

Question by Suzzette Patten

Answer

Here are some baby steps that you can do with a small amount of time, but can help edge you up in the rankings. Here’s what I suggest!

Step #2: Create Service, Content, and Location Pages

You might find that when you search up your website on SemRush, or any other SEO analysis tool, you’ll see that your “indexed keywords” are low, perhaps even below 20.

This is because your website, either, hasn’t developed the necessary amount of authority through other SEO activities like link-building, or hasn’t created enough pages to target all the relevant keywords.

For example, if you service the Vancouver Area, and also the Kelowna Area, you’ll want to create unique pages for both of them. The reason for this is that Google prioritizes pages that are MOST relevant and MOST targeted to the search at hand.

So if somebody searches “Vancouver Donut Shop”, Google will serve pages that specifically state that their shop is about donuts, and is also in Vancouver.

By making two highly targeted pages for those two specific location searches, your pages are MUCH more likely to reach the first page of Google.

If you don’t have service areas, you might want to consider creating quality content instead, tailored for certain keywords or questions being searched, or even targeted industry pages, such as “Law Firm Donut Catering” for example.

Answer

There is one thing in particular that Google looks for more than anything else when it comes to ranking websites. It’s been verified and confirmed time and time again that this metric is by far the most important thing to focus on as an SEO, and any SEO site has thousands of them, if not millions.
The answer is “BACKLINKS”. More specifically, “referring domains”.

A “referring domain” is a website, other than yours, that is linking towards a page of your website. A “backlink” is simply how many links are pointing to your website, so one site could have up to 5,000+ backlinks from one website, but after the first couple links, Google doesn’t care much about the rest from a single website.

This is what Google said about backlinks:

“Backlinks are still the best way to review the importance of something on the web. If authoritative sites are linking to a piece of your content, that’s a good sign. It means your content is of high-quality, and seen as important by other experts in the field.”

Answer

This question is from Allison Pehleman, thanks Allison.

SEO for the creative space is tricky because you need to define what you want to gain from SEO for your business. Do you want to get more views on a Youtube video of your dance, for example, or are you looking to sell a painting.

At the end of the day, SEO can benefit every single business in one way or another, so knowing exactly what benefit you’re looking for is paramount.

But for this question I’m going to assume you’re looking to sell something, as that’s what most businesses want at the end of the day, sales.

SEO For “Creatives”

Are you looking to sell more paintings or other creative pieces? Then it’s important to get your artwork in front of eyeballs.

SEO is capable of getting your creative gallery on the top of Google searches like: “Abstract paintings”, “Buy landscape paintings online”, etc. But that’s not the only way SEO can help a visual business.

Consider this, when you apply Search Engine Optimization best practices on images, such as an image of your finished and framed painting, then you can rank pictures of your paintings on Google Images.
Google Images is Google’s dedicated search tab that shows the most relevant images for your search.

Now imagine if your painting shows up at the top of the image results when someone searches “Boat Painting for Sale”, and then browse images so that they can visually see the painting before they investigate further.

Even though they never visited your website through the actual search results, they were still able to find your painting, which could interest them enough to visit your website and purchase a piece.

You can imagine that a large percentage of users searching for paintings to buy are looking for paintings that catch their eye.

What better way to make more sales than to get in front of interested buyers visually when they’re looking to make a purchase.

Finally, I just want to reiterate that you need to know exactly what result you’re looking for when you choose a form of marketing, not just SEO.

SEO is fantastic when you’re trying to reach people who are searching for your service or product specifically, but if you find that keywords are scarce, or ambiguous, you can prioritize other marketing avenues such Social Media Marketing.

The fact remains, though, that Search Engine Optimization is one of the best investments you can make for the long-term for almost any business.

Thanks for the question!

Question by Allison Pehleman

Answer

Google has been looking more and more at Social signals as a way to gauge websites, and in many cases rank them.

Social signals are every Social Media action that shares, likes, or otherwise promotes your social media or your posted content.

Although Google has openly stated that “Social Signals” are “NOT a ranking factor”, the data shows otherwise.

SEO experts around the world have been deciphering the Google algorithm for decades, and they constantly run tests and correlation analysis’ to find patterns in the algorithm.

Naturally, social signals became a HUGE focus for these types of testing, and the results were rather surprising.

According to the data, there is a clear correlation between social signals and Google SERP rankings.

Image Courtesy of Search Metrics

You might be asking, “but why would Google say it’s not a ranking factor if it is?”.

The answer could be that Google doesn’t want to openly admit it’s a ranking factor and potentially spark a huge wave of black-hat SEOs abusing the algorithm by paying click-farms to spike their social signals. At least, until they have a system in place to sort the spam from the real engagement.

In any event, social signals ARE a ranking factor, so it needs to be considered when optimizing a website’s SEO.

Wrapping Up Our SEO Q&A (January 2020)

Images courtesy of Backlinko

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